Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [294]
In a few cases, this “liquidation” went relatively smoothly. Arriving at the first camp division, troops caught the prisoners by surprise. Over the camp loudspeaker, the Norilsk chief prosecutor, Babilov, told the prisoners to leave the zona, assuring them that those who walked away peacefully would not be punished for their part in the “sabotage.” According to the official report, most of the prisoners did leave. Seeing that they were isolated, the ringleaders left as well. Out in the taiga, soldiers and camp bosses sorted the prisoners into groups. Trucks were waiting to take away those suspected of instigating the strike, and the “innocent” were allowed to return to the camp.
Some of the subsequent “liquidations” went less smoothly. When the authorities followed the same procedure on the following day in another lagpunkt, the strike leaders first threatened those wanting to leave—and then locked themselves into one of the barracks, from which they had to be forcibly removed. In the women’s camp, the prisoners formed a human circle and hung a black flag—a symbol of unjustly murdered comrades—in the center, and began to scream and shout slogans. After five hours of this, the guards began spraying them with powerful hoses. Only then did the circle break up sufficiently for the guards to drag the women out of the camp.
In lagpunkt No. 5, as many as 1,400 prisoners, mostly Ukrainians and Balts, refused to leave the zona. Instead, they hung black flags from their barracks, conducting themselves, in the words of an MVD bureaucrat, with “extreme aggression.” Then, when the camp guards, assisted by forty soldiers, attempted to rope off the barracks and protect the camp’s food supplies, a crowd of 500 prisoners attacked. They shouted curses and cheers, threw rocks, hit the soldiers with clubs and picks, tried to knock their guns out of their arms. The official report describes what happened next: “At the most critical moment of their attack on the guards, the soldiers opened fire on the prisoners. After the conclusion of the shooting, the prisoners were forced to lie on the ground. After this, the prisoners began to fulfill all of the orders of the guards and of the camp administration.”24
According to the same report, twenty-three prisoners died that day. According to eyewitnesses, several hundred prisoners died over several days in Norilsk, in a series of similar incidents.
The authorities put down the Vorkuta strike in a similar manner. Lagpunkt by lagpunkt, soldiers and police troops forced the prisoners out of the camps, sorted them into groups of 100, and put them through a “filtration” process, separating the presumed strike leaders from the other prisoners. In order to get the prisoners to leave peacefully, the Moscow commission also loudly promised all of the prisoners that their cases would be reviewed, and that the strike leaders would not be shot. The ruse worked: thanks to General Maslennikov’s “fatherly” attitude, “we believed him,” one of the participants later explained.25
In one camp, however—the lagpunkt beside mine No. 29—the prisoners did not believe the general—and when Maslennikov told them to return to work, they refused. Soldiers arrived, bringing a fire engine with them, intending to use water hoses to break up the crowd:
But before the hoses could be unwound and turned on us, Ripetsky waved the prisoners forward and a wall of them advanced, turning the vehicle out of the gate as if it had been a toy . . . There was a salvo of shots from the guards, straight into the mass of prisoners. But we were standing with our arms linked, and at first no one fell, though many were dead and wounded. Only Ihnatowicz, a little in front of the line, was standing alone. He seemed to stand for a moment in astonishment, then